About

The latest posts are about our third round Britain and Ireland cruise, exploring what must surely be the most interesting and varied coastline in the whole of Europe. This nostalgic repeat was prompted by an alarmingly big birthday, a growing realisation that our years of sailing cannot go on forever, and the fact that two tours of our islands are not enough to do them justice: seen from the sea, they are an entirely different world from the one we thought we knew so well when travelling by land.

Each of the round-Britain cruises since 2007 has been planned to take two years, though we have added a year to the latest, so when we get home next year we will have spent 7 seasons on our circuits.

Not everything on the blog is about offshore sailing or even the recent past: there are posts about building a lapstrake pram dinghy, about electronic navigation, chart (in)accuracy, and jamming and spoofing of GNSS signals. There are also accounts of inland boating, including the Venice lagoon, where I’m learning to row gondolier-style, and about regular crewing in the annual Transadriatica race from Venice to Croatia and back. For some obscure reason, two posts I wrote in a pedantic mood about the pronunciation of bowsprit are among the most frequently read.

This is an entirely personal blog, started originally in 2012 as a diary to look back on when I finally retire from the water – so I can easily be tempted to reminisce. You’ll find tales from as long ago as the early 1950s, when I first learnt to sail dinghies. Later, there was our hair-raising first crossing of the Channel in an Iroquois catamaran in 1971; there was the great row at the Guardian newspaper in 1989, when two of us persuaded the paper to sponsor a yacht in the Fastnet, and invited Ted Heath, the celebrated yachtsman (and incidentally former Prime Minister) to launch it. I also include the story of how I got the blame in 2004 for sinking – in a manner of speaking – the Bank of England’s £300,000 racing yacht.

For those who like the classics, I had a fascinating opportunity in 2011 to study the 2,500 year old argument about the settings for Homer’s Odyssey, which you can read about in ‘Greek pilotage puzzle: where’s Ithaca?’ And there are occasional posts plugging Adlard Coles’ Pass Your Yachtmaster and Pass Your Day Skipper, with cartoons by the late Mike Peyton – I was invited to update the books for the latest editions, as joint author with David Fairhall.

Finally, there’s my attempt to explain to non-sailing friends why we spend so much time and money on boats – see the post titled Tide by Tide. The full text of the John Ruskin quote in the heading above is in this post, and well worth reading.

Navigating the blog: Most of it has been written and published on my phone and it looks best on tablets and phones though – like all WordPress sites – it can be read in a computer browser version as well.

Home page is All Posts, where you can see short excerpts of each post with links to the full version.

Phones/tablets: Key headings can be seen by tapping on the three bars at top left on a phone or in Menu on tablets. Detailed lists of items are underneath the posts, one by broad subject and the other by most recent posts.

Laptop browsers: the headings appear across the top and the lists are to the right of the posts.